lishing. “But the book is not just anoth-er file type. It’s the summit of individualpersonal expression, an integral whole.The book reflects a person and it mustnot be allowed to die.” Not the usualmessage one hears from digital natives,especially an ur-digital native such asLanier. To reassure the audience of thesincerity of his message, he told the as-sembled publishers, “I want you to suc-ceed,” and said he “turned down an offerfrom Amazon to publish my book.”McQuivey, on the other hand, ac-knowledged that his book was publishedby the #1 publishing disruptor, Amazon,which he chose because he wanted “toown disruption.”The digital transformation, Laniersaid, is a bad idea run amuck. “I wasaround at the dawn of the digital world.I have a different persepective on it; itsdevelopment was haphazard and arbi-trary,” he said. “But it can be changed,”he said, telling the audience that digitalevils like easy copying and file sharingcan be reversed. “The world doesn’t haveto be this way. Technology can be rein-vented.”“I was part of the early rhetoric aboutdestroying the traditional publishingand social media,disruptive trans-formation is cheap,easy and constant.

“Build new processes and relationships,” he said,
“disrupt yourselves” before your competitors do it,
including competitors from sectors publishers may never have considered before.

In the past, McQuivey said, disruption
was expensive and essentially came from
within each business sector—he used the
ATM machine and the banking industry as
an example. But today, in a world with
more than 70 million Kindles, 195 million
iPads, and hundreds of millions of smartphones, McQuivey said embracing disruption “is an economic imperative. The economics of disruption can work for big
publishers.” Get staff involved, he exhorted, set their ideas free, budgets are no longer a barrier. “Let your staff and your authors explore new ways of doing business.”
A well-known technology author and
thinker, Lanier is also a charismatic digital apostate, who laments the rise of
digital networks and their impact on
culture. The author of Who Owns the Future? but also a one-time pioneer in computer programming, Lanier essentially
apologized to the assembled AAP members for his role in helping to develop the
digital networks that power the world
we live in today. “I started something
that hurt you badly,” he said, focusing on
the impact of technology on book pub-

Speakers James McQuivey and Jaron
Lanier give new meaning to the notion
of a digital divide

Though headlined by former Secretary of State Hillary Rod- ham Clinton, and including a report on the progress of congressional copyright-related legislation
by Rep. Jerry Nadler (Dem., N.Y.), this
year’s Association of American Publishers
annual meeting was really focused on the
impact of disruptive innovation in the
publishing sector. Indeed, the primary
speakers, Forrester Research technology
analyst James McQuivey and iconoclastic
polymath Jaron Lanier, gave new meaning
to the term “digital divide,” offering
sharply contrasting reactions to rise of
digital networks, devices, and social media and their disruptive impact on traditional business and the culture at large.

On the one hand, they both believe the
havoc unleashed on traditional businesses
by digital technology is essentially perpetual, but they diverge very quickly after that. For McQuivey, author of Digital
Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of
Innovation, disruption is the status quo
and it is inevitable, a natural byproduct
of relentless technological development
that creates new opportunities in otherwise static marketplaces. “Digital accelerates disruption, other companies see
ways into the markets of other businesses,” he said. “Disruption today is cheap,
more people can participate,” he said before noting more specifically, “authors
can bring their own ideas to market without publishers. We have to rethink how
we deal with disruption.”